Project for Public Spaces

Who We Are

Robin Lester

Manager, Marketing & Communications

Robin joined the PPS staff in 2008 as Manager of Marketing and Communications. She works to streamline and create communication content across the PPS website, and is working on implementing a new PPS blog that will incorporate general placemaking news, PPS project updates and individual stories from locales that have been improved by Placemaking initiatives. She also manages the Making Places newsletter and the PPS Bulletin and assists with the development of new PPS publications . She is instrumental in delivering the message of PPS to local activists, community members, developers, policy makers and professionals from the architecture/planning and landscape design disciplines.

Robin is also an accomplished community blogger who founded and writes Clinton Hill Blog, a website devoted to local reporting and community member interviews and profiles in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. She has also guest-blogged for Curbed.com. Additionally, she is a freelance photographer for the Brooklyn Paper and teaches both private and group tap dance lessons.

Prior to her arrival at PPS, Robin spent more than five years at Moon City Productions, a small niche marketing and advertising company, writing educational travel advertorials and web seminars, as well as constructing media plans and managing event sponsorships for clients. She oversaw Subaru of America’s successful multi-year Presenting Sponsorship of the AIDS LifeCycle, a week-long cycling event to raise money for AIDS research and outreach, as well as facilitated several other sponsorships and partnerships on behalf of Subaru. She also composed multi-page advertorials on the behalf of advertisers of Travel Weekly and Meetings & Conventions magazines.

Robin started her career in the music industry, working in Promotions, A&R and Marketing for both Warner Bros. Records, Inc. and Elektra Entertainment Group. There she worked on licensing, maintained image databases and wrote artist bios and email blasts.

Robin recently received her MA in Sociology from the New School for Social Research in New York City. Her focuses included urban sociology, ethnography and the sociology of class. She is currently working on an ethnography of the blogging community in New York City.

Education

The New School for Social Research, Master of Arts, Sociology, 2008

Newhouse School of Public Communications, Syracuse University, Bachelor of Science, Television, Radio and Film (magna cum laude), 2000